Data backs up success story at voke school

Quick; which four-year public high school is the top performer in the city?

If your answer is the Worcester Technical High School, you are most likely a member of that school’s community.

Few could have predicted that this would be the case when the vocational school and the city’s comprehensive high schools were asked to meet the same high academic standards of the state’s education reform law.

Other city high schools might have more students performing in the advanced and proficient levels on the MCAS. Other city high schools might be the home to Worcester’s most talented and brightest students.

But the vocational high school appears to doing the most for all its students.

“It is a remarkable story,” said Sheila Harrity, the principal.

But why take her word? Since education these days is all about outcomes, let’s just let the numbers do the talking:

The percentage of students scoring at the proficient level on the MCAS English Language Arts exam increased from 27 percent last year to 46 percent this year, while the failure rate on the exam dipped from 14 percent to 7 percent.

In math, 20 percent of the students taking the exam scored at the advanced level, compared to 10 percent last year.

The school is the city’s only public four-year high school that is meeting the No Child Left Behind improvement and graduation goals. The school’s graduation rate is the highest of the five public, four-year high schools in the city.

The opportunity to apply what they learn academically to their vocational training is one reason students are becoming successful, Ms. Harrity said.

Beyond the hard work of students and staff, some of the following deserve some scrutiny:

•While the city’s high schools have been restructured into small academic units, to various degrees, most of the schools generally lack space to provide real independence among programs.

The vocational school’s brand-new facility provides optimum space to deploy its small school programs — four schools, each with six vocations, an assistant principal and a guidance counselor, each in its own wing of the building.

•The vocational high school student-teacher ratio is 9.6 to 1. The student-teacher ratio at Doherty, South, Burncoat and North are, respectively, 16.9 to 1; 13.4 to 1; 16 to 1; 16.2 to 1.

Despite budget cuts over the past years, school officials are committed to keeping the student ratio low at the technical high school, which enrolls 850 students.

Eventually, the school is expected to enroll 1,400 students, and as the enrollment grows, new teachers will be added to maintain the low student-teacher ratio.

•Each year, students — provided they have passed the required subjects — are generally promoted to the high school in their quadrant. An application is necessary to get into the technical school.

This year, 800 students applied for enrollment. Just 100 were chosen. It might be difficult to assess the impact of the application process, but it clearly establishes that getting to the high school is a privilege and not a right.

Now, the school has had its detractors, and perhaps there still some who are not happy with its management or its merger with the Worcester public schools.

Yet, these detractors would have to concede that the merger was not the kiss of death they thought it would be, and that Ms. Harrity’s leadership has aided, rather than hindered, the school’s growth.

Any lingering resentment about the school’s merger and its principal should now give way to a conscientious study of what is making the school so successful.

We know others outside the city are curious.

The school has twice been profiled in a national school plant and management magazine and educators from Iceland visited the school last week.